Internet social networks have become a significant phenomenon. Social networks allow an Internet user to create an account and a user profile and interact with other users of the social network. A social network user can share content and interact with content shared by other users. Social network users typically assemble a group of friends or followers with whom they interact. Once approved, the “friendship” typically gives both users access to each other's profiles and the content posted on them. Content postings and other user activities may generate stories that are visible to other users. Stories may include links to content internal or external to the social network. A user may view stories generated by the activities of his friends by accessing their profiles individually or by accessing his news feed, an interface that displays stories from several users and summarizes the activities of the user's friends. Friends can comment on a story, share a story, visit the links included in a story, or otherwise interact with each other's stories. In this way, social networks allow users to mimic real-life interactions in the context of an online community.
Social networks are providing users with increasingly sophisticated functionality. Early social networks offered little more than a simple interface for users to communicate and post messages. Now, on many social networks, users may share numerous different types of content and interact with each other's content in a variety of ways. Content shared on a social network may include links to external resources. The external resources may include entities that lie outside of the control of the social network. These entities may vary greatly in reputability and may serve both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. Many entities may seek to use social networks as a platform to further illegitimate purposes.